Cities Of 'Opportunity' Are Key To Urbanism

Cities such as Houston are where economic opportunity and cultural vibrancy both thrive.

Cities such as Houston are where economic opportunity and cultural vibrancy both thrive. (iStockphoto)

JOEL KOTKIN | PLACE

What is a city for? It's a crucial question, but one rarely asked by the pundits and developers who dominate the debate over the future of the American city.

Their current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high-scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. It's city as adult Disneyland or "entertainment machine," chock-a-block with chic restaurants, shops and festivals.

Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: homeownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and "human scale" neighborhoods.

A vast majority of people — roughly 80 percent — prefer a single-family home, whether in the city or surrounding communities. And they may not get "creative" gigs at ad agencies or writers collectives, but look instead for decent-paying opportunities in fields such as construction, manufacturing or logistics. Over the past decade, these jobs have been declining rapidly in "luxury cities" like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In contrast, such jobs, which pay $60,000 to $100,000 annually, have been growing particularly as the industrial and energy sectors have recovered in cities like Houston, Austin, Nashville and Salt Lake City. These locales also feature housing, relative to incomes, that is more affordable.

Of course, few urbanists wax poetic about Dallas or Des Moines. They lack Brooklyn's hipster charm, and often maintain some of the trappings of the suburbs. But these "opportunity cities" offer what Descartes called "an inventory of the possible" urbanity as an engine of upward mobility for the middle and working classes.

Ever since the Great Recession, many in America's urban-focused pundit class have written off these cities, particularly in the Sunbelt, as places where the American dream has gone to die. Yet over the past 30 years, and now again, virtually all of the fastest-growing American metropolitan areas were located in the West or the South. In 2012, nine of the 10 fastest-growing large metropolitan areas were in the Sunbelt, including big Texas cities like Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, along with Denver, Raleigh, N.C., and Phoenix. In 2013, Houston alone had more housing starts than the entire state of California.

At the same time, immigrants — traditionally the most determined seekers of upward mobility — are now also flocking to places like low-cost Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, which ranked second to New York in the last decade as a destination for the foreign-born. Immigrants are even heading in large numbers to locales such as Charlotte, N.C., and Nashville, where foreign-born populations have doubled over the past decade. Finally, these cities also have enjoyed generally faster growth among both college graduates and people ages 20 to 29 than New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

These trends can also be seen in population projections. A U.S. Conference of Mayors study predicts that Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston will grow to be nearly as large as Chicago by 2042. If the same growth rate were to continue through 2050, both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston would be ahead of Chicago by 2050.

Perhaps most important of all, these are overwhelmingly the places where people choose to start families and raise children. All 10 of the cities (metropolitan areas) with the largest shares of children 0-14 years of age are opportunity cities, with Salt Lake City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Riverside-San Bernardino and San Antonio taking the top five positions. On the other hand, luxury cities, such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle and Miami, tend to rank in the bottom third, according to American Community Survey data.

What this all suggests is that the future of American urbanism cannot follow the trajectory of luxury cities that, by their very nature, are difficult places for the vast majority of the population to live. Instead, the new role models including for the hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt will be found in those regions that have been able to provide the basic elements of middle-class aspiration: decent jobs, affordable housing and the chance to start a growing business.

To achieve an urbanism that works for most Americans, cities need to develop a very different focus, emphasizing such things as affordability, middle-class jobs and opportunity.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and author of "The New Class Conflict." A longer version of this piece first appeared in The Washington Post.